Field
The present application relates to a method and a system for providing a transaction platform that facilitates trading of pre-owned merchandise.
Related Art
With the rapid development of the manufacturing technology, costs of mobile devices, such as cell phones, smartphones, tablet computers, etc., have decreased continuously, thus leading to the prevalence of mobile devices among populations. In recent years, global sales of the mobile devices account for hundreds of millions. In the meantime, the continuous innovation on mobile device technologies prompts many users to own multiple devices of the same type at the same time. For example, a user may purchase an iPhone® (registered trademark of Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.) of the latest version while still owning one of the previous version. Many of the previously owned mobile devices can be recycled or resold. In addition, some non-operational devices may urgently need proper disposal. Improper handling of these pre-owned devices may result in resource waste and sometimes severe environmental damages.
In order to effectively recycle the pre-owned mobile devices and to properly dispose the non-operational devices, recycling services for mobile devices have appeared to play an important role in the handling of the pre-owned devices. In general, during a sale transaction, the final price of a pre-owned device is negotiated between the seller (owner of the pre-owned device) and the buyer (the recycler), with the main price-determination factor being the overall condition of the device. However, such a process has been proved to be too subjective, with the device owner often suspicious of the price offered by the buyer. The lacking of a scientific and rational pricing mechanism for pre-owned devices can lead to mistrust between the sellers and the buyers. Specifically, during a transaction between the recycler and the owner of a pre-owned device, bargaining is often performed based on past experiences or subjective judgments, and malicious attempts to suppress the resale price of the device can occur, resulting in the lack of trust by many device owners toward the recycling services. Correspondingly, the recyclers also face some obstacles when providing the recycling services, such as attracting sellers or obtaining truthful device information from the sellers.
With the rapid development of the Internet technologies, various applications have emerged to allow a user to publish information regarding selling his pre-owned devices, thus enabling other users to contact the user to purchase the device after seeing the information. For example, a user may place an ad on an online bulletin boarding regarding a for-sale item. However, in these conventional approaches, a seller is often unable to accurately price his own pre-owned device based on the current market value, and hence, often fails to present an appropriate asking price when placing the ad. In addition, in such scenarios, an agreement between the seller and the purchaser is often hard to reach. As a result, the pre-owned device is unlikely to be resold or transferred. Considering that certain network resources have been used for publishing the device information, when the transaction eventually fails after negotiation, the published information becomes useless and the used network resources are waste.
In summary, it is desired to provide a web-based service that effectively facilitates transactions of pre-owned merchandise with an enhanced success rate, thus reducing possible waste of network resources caused by publishing useless recycle information.